My favorite summer golf hole: CEOs escape the heat at the Rockies' Omni Interlocken and Monterey's Spanish Bay. (Executive Privilege).

One day afternoon, while his father and uncles were gathered around the television watching golf, 8-year-old Don Awalt rummaged through his grandmother's artic and found a rusted set of clubs. He took a few swings and trundled downstairs, declaring he was ready to take up the game. Told he had much to learn, the boy said he'd already seen it all on TV. Well, he recalls one of his uncles as saying, "If you're so smart, what's the 19th hole?"

"I had no clue," says Awalt, who nearly four decades later is founder and CEO of RDA Corp., a custom software development firm based outside Baltimore. The private company had nearly $40 million in sales last year from such clients as Raytheon and Ernst & Young.

As a member of Caves Valley Golf Club in Owings Mills, Md., the 46-year-old Awalt is now well acquainted with the 19th hole--where golfers customarily raise a glass after the round. In fact, it's at the 19th hole that he, like many CEOs, typically caps off a day of golf with current or potential clients.

Despite the heat and humidity that blanket the region in summer, Caves Valley, site of June's U.S. Senior Open, is Awalt's favorite place to entertain and play golf this time of year. Caves Valley opened in 1991, founded by a group of local business leaders dismayed at the Baltimore area's lack of top-notch private golf clubs. To design the course, they hired Tom Fazio, considered one of the world's finest golf architects. On an old hilltop estate built by Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Fazio laid out a 7,000-yard course that winds through pastures and woods and over rolling hills in historic hunt country, less than half an hour from downtown Baltimore.

Among the things Awalt likes most about Caves Valley is that it's what's known as a traditional "golfer's club." There are no tennis courts or swimming pool. Long pants must be worn. And walking is encouraged over taking a cart. "It's just you and your caddie basically," says Awalt. "It's very quiet. You don't hear all the engines and that kind of stuff."

A 10-handicapper, Awalt considers the demanding sixth hole his favorite. The 425-yard par four is a dog-leg right, with trees lining the left side and heavy rough and a fairway bunker on the right. While some players try to clear the corner with their drives, Awalt takes a more conservative approach. He swings smoothly and tries to hit it safely down the middle. That usually leaves him about 175 yards from the green--a perfect Live-iron. Despite a steep bunker guarding the left side of the green and a putting surface pitched from left to right, Awalt often emerges with a par. "For some reason," he says, "I just really get up for that hole and I play it well."

John Hansen, CEO of the Colorado Institute of Technology also plays golf pretty well now that he refuses to take it seriously. "A couple years ago, says Hansen, 42, "I got real serious and said, 'I've got to become Jack Welch or Scott McNealy--a real serious CEO golfer.' I found that I started having less fun, and I was less fun to play with."

So he decided to take a more relaxed approach. Instead of worrying about his score, Hansen, who averages between 86 and 90, simply tries to enjoy the beauty of Rocky Mountain golf. In summer, he often plays at the Omni Interlocken near his office in suburban Denver. The 27-hole resort course, which is open to the public, hosts the annual Sun Microsystems John Elway Celebrity Classic. Built three years ago by 1981 U.S. Open champ David Graham and Gary Panks, the Omni Interlocken sits at the base of the Flatiron Range, where the Rockies meet the Plains. It features 400 feet of elevation change and views of snow-capped peaks.

Not surprisingly, Hansen's favorite hole at the Omni Interlocken, No. 6 on the Vista Nine, plays downhill. A short par four of 267 yards, it presents a choice: try to drive the green and risk making bogey or worse, or play it safe and lay up. Hansen chooses the latter. He favors a five-iron off the tee, hitting the ball just over 160 yards. That easily clears a crossing stream and leaves him 100 yards--a full pitching wedge--to the green. From there, Hansen says, he often pars, and sometimes birdies, the hole.

Golf became Hansen's entree when he moved to Colorado from Seattle three years ago to become CEO of the Boulder-based software company Solant (which has since been sold to Avolent of San Francisco). Knowing almost no one, he had his marketing vice president find out about Denver's fund-raising golf tournaments, and during his first year in town Hansen played in them all. He also joined several industry associations that sponsored outings and played in those, too. Soon, he developed a circle of golfing CEOs. "Because I was able to find other CEOs who golf," he says, "it was a way to very quickly get connected in the community."

Those connections have proved useful to Hansen at the Colorado Institute of Technology, which he was appointed to run by Governor Bill Owens. The institute promotes Colorado as a tech industry hub and acts as a bridge between companies seeking highly skilled workers and universities that train them. Hansen golfs with key people from both realms.

Bob Piccinini, chairman and CEO of Modesto, Calif.-based Save Mart Supermarkets, also plays both for business and pleasure. When July and August roll around, he escapes the heat of California's Central Valley and heads for cooler weather on the coast. "There's a common saying out here," Piccinini says. "'The coldest winter I ever had was the summer in San Francisco.'"

Piccinini plays most of his summer golf on the Monterey Peninsula, particularly at the Links at Spanish Bay, a public course. With its canted fairways framed by windswept dunes, Spanish Bay is a tribute to Scottish golf. There's even a kilted bagpiper who wails a plaintive song at the end of each day's play. Robert Trent Jones Jr. designed the 15-year-old course with input from Sandy Tatum and Tom Watson. who, as winner of five British Opens, knows a thing or two about classic links golf. (Unlike most American courses, true links such as those in the British Isles are more "discovered" than they are designed. Their distinguishing features--sand dunes whiskered with native grasses, fairways with hidden bunkers and hollows, and strong prevailing winds--are nature's work.) Piccinini says Spanish Bay's treeless dunescape really sets it apart.

His favorite hole is the imposing, 574-yard par five 18th, but he makes no claim to having mastered it. "I'm a 24-handicap, and I don't play any hole very well," says the 60-year-old CEO, whose private company has nearly 100 California stores and $1.6 billion in annual sales. Although his game isn't as sharp as he'd like, Piccinini enjoys a good match. "One of the nice things about golf," he says, "is that if your handicaps are accurate, then a bad golfer and a good golfer can compete."

Not that a CEO would know anything about competition.

Send comments to CE at [e-mail].